Appeared in documentaries: Dino de Laurentiis: The Last Movie Mogul (Adrian
Silbey 2001); The Road to Casino Royale (short) (John Cork 2008); The
Making of Never Say Never Again (short) (Steve Mitchell 2009); "Holy
Batman!" (2010), episode of Totally Tracked Down.

When I first wrote this entry, I was obliged to rely
upon the few facts I could glean from various sources, along with some
plausible conjectures. Since that time, I have learned at least one more thing
about Lorenzo Semple, Jr.—he was apparently a fine family member who long
remained very well regarded by his relatives, for I received two e-mails from
men claiming to be one of his brothers, challenging the accuracy of this fact
or that conjecture, and another, more recent message from a relative who has
investigated his life using the resources of Ancestry.com. Humbly acknowledging
all of this assistance, I will now endeavor to bolster the truthiness of this
entry in assessing the career of the late Mr. Semple.

Census records now appear to reveal that Semple was actually born on March
23, 1923, close to the 1922 date that I originally settled on. One assumes that
he was the son of Lorenzo Semple, incorrectly described as a wealthy Southern
lawyer—he was actually a graduate of the Naval Academy and a New York
businessman—and one further assumes that his elder sister was the man's daughter,
Ellen Semple, who married noted playwright Philip Barry and perhaps provided
the connections that led to his later work on Broadway—an assumption that has
not yet been challenged. Despite a mention that he was a sophomore at Yale
University in 1942, another record indicates that he enlisted in the United
States Army in June 1943 after one year of college, which would suggest that he
actually started college in 1942. We are also told that he volunteered to serve
in World War II as an ambulance driver not to avoid more dangerous military
action, but rather to emulate his uncle John, who had been an ambulance driver
in World War I. Furthermore, his unit suffered many casualties in Africa, and
after Semple lost part of his leg, he continued to serve his country during the
rest of World War II as a member of Army Intelligence. All of these grim and
heroic experiences, however, did not seem to have much of an impact on Semple,
since his later writings would consistently suggest to any amateur biographer that
he was only the carefree scion of a rich and prominent East Coast family who
never had to worry about getting anything he wanted, and hence was perfectly
prepared to go through life regarding the worldly travails of others as nothing
more than elaborate jokes.

Semple began his career in 1951 by contributing stories to The Saturday
Evening Post, Argosy, and Ladies Home Journal, but soon he
was focusing more on playwriting, scripting two lightweight Broadway shows—Tonight
in Samarkand (1955) and The Golden Fleecing (1959), the latter a
mildly fantastic tale of two sailors using a computer to make money gambling
that was made into a film called The Honeymoon Machine. He also dabbled
in New York television with an odd episode of The Alcoa Hour, 'The
Archangel Harrigan,' about a man who claimed he could fly—foreshadowing
his later involvement with superheroes. By the 1960s, undoubtedly after a few
more phone calls on his behalf, he was well established in Hollywood,
contributing to programs like Kraft Suspense Theatre, Burke's Law,
The Rogues, and The Rat Patrol, and soon, he was planning to
spend the 1966-1967 television season contributing scripts to a new fantasy
series he had co-written the pilot for, featuring veteran clown Bert Lahr as Thompson's
Ghost. However, after the pilot was unexpectedly rejected and recycled as
an episode of Vacation Playhouse, Semple was available for assignments
when he received a phone call from producer William DOZIER, desperately seeking
someone to help him with the daunting project ABC had placed in his lap—a
weekly series starring the comic-book hero Batman. And this, of course,
became the work that would make him famous, or infamous, depending upon your
perspective.

By writing most of the series' early episodes, Semple indelibly set the tone
for the program's campy combination of exciting adventures for the kids and
knowing wisecracks for their parents, and one must acknowledge that the
results, at least initially, were strikingly entertaining, even brilliant. His
humorous dialogue, and Frank Gorshin's frenetic overacting, transformed an
obscure villain, the Riddler, into a major figure in the Batman mythos,
and he significantly helped Burgess MEREDITH and Cesar
ROMERO revitalize their careers by establishing distinctive personalities for
their performances as the Penguin and the Joker. Still, the program's success
cannot be credited entirely to Dozois and Semple, for the regular actors played
key parts as well—especially Adam
WEST—by imbuing the cardboard
characters with their own sort of surreal conviction, making them seem like
real people forced to confront absurd situations and allowing audiences to
become genuinely involved in their contrived plights. This is an important
point in explaining Semple's later failures in filmmaking, as actors in
two-hour movies would not enjoy the same sustained opportunity to overcome the
mind-numbing effects of the often incessant frivolity in his plots and
dialogue.

Although Semple did help out Dozier with one episode of his next series, The
Green Hornet, the success of Batman otherwise enabled Semple to move
up the ladder to writing feature films, beginning (obviously) with his splashy
but strangely enervated Batman movie, and soon followed by the
overlooked Raquel Welsh spy thriller Fathom and what remains his most
memorable work, the quirky and unsettling Pretty Poison (1968), which
uncharacteristically conveyed some genuine pain amidst its jokey melodrama . In
the 1970s, he first seemed to be playing it straight, churning out popular
mainstream fare like Papillon (1973), The Parallax View (1974), The
Drowning Pool (1975), and Three Days of the Condor (1975); but when
producer Dino de LAURENTIIS hired him to update King Kong, the old
fratboy silliness returned to center stage. The celluloid disaster that
resulted must be attributed principally to Semple—no matter how tempting it is
to instead blame its overbearing producer, shoddy special effects, unassertive
director, and miscast, ineffectual actors—because Semple, utterly unable to
discern anything profound or evocative in the story of King Kong, regarded it
only as a pretext for a succession of lame witticisms. The moment when Jessica
Lange, finding herself suddenly in the hand of a giant ape, screams out
'You goddamn chauvinist pig ape!' epitomizes everything that was so
irksomely miscalculated about the film.

King Kong spectacularly launched Semple's decline. Someone searching
for nice things to say about subsequent efforts might argue that Never Say
Never Again was tolerable enough, no doubt due to Sean
CONNERY's sobering influence,
and that Flash Gordon can be moderately amusing if you are in the right
frame of mind and are mentally prepared to waste two hours of your precious
time on brightly colored nonsense. But absolutely nothing can be said in
defense of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, another colossal bomb that
probably inspired whispered conversations all around Hollywood to the effect
that Semple was losing his touch, the sort of feedback that can sink the career
of even the most charmingly sociable and well-connected screenwriter.

For whatever reason, Semple since that time was credited only with two
television movies, Rearview Mirror (1984) and Rapture (1993),
although he made uncredited contributions to the film Never Too Young to Die
(1986), and a few journal entries in a 1997 issue of the online magazine Slate
suggest that he long remained active on the Hollywood scene, still trying to
peddle scripts to interested producers. Perhaps, always an inveterate
prankster, he spent his declining years pretending to be his brother and
sending grouchy e-mails to chroniclers of his career who weren't quite getting
everything right. But one prefers to think that he settled into an unheralded
second career as an anonymous script doctor, the reliable old standby one
called upon to add a few jokes to an expensive script that somehow doesn't seem
to be touching every conceivable base in its quest to please every conceivable
audience. I wouldn't be surprised to hear, for example, that Semple made a few
uncredited contributions to the mess that was the American Godzilla
(1998), like the scene where some technicians about to confront Godzilla are
observed watching Barney the Purple Dinosaur on television. Perhaps, now that
he has died, we will be learning more about other, previously unknown projects,
just as we keep learning more and more about Ben
HECHT's shadowy career of
uncredited work. For no one can deny that Semple had a gift for lighthearted
satirical humor that can be appreciated and celebrated, especially when taken
in small doses.